We don’t talk enough about how The Abyss is a fucking masterpiece, and I’m not sure why.
Well, yeah, we do. Alone among James Cameron’s big-screen offerings, The Abyss did not do so hot on initial release. While even an otherwise diverting lark like True Lies smashed its way to bonanza box office, The Abyss, while something of a success, failed to break $100 million at the box office. It was also notoriously shredded by the studio, losing close to an hour from Cameron’s preferred cut, including what had been the thematic spine for the whole story, and virtually the entire climax.
The version that was dropped into theaters in 1989 was a mangled thing, hardly worth the incredibly debilitating production that drove many in the cast and crew to emotional and physical extremes.
It’s no wonder that many have forgotten The Abyss, or, if they do remember it, consider it as little more than a footnote in a filmography stuffed with Terminators and Avatars and Titanic…s..es. You get the idea.
But those who ignore The Abyss do so at their own peril. At its true, three-hour cut, it is a towering work of imagination and ingenuity, and one of the great science fiction films of the modern age, and remains Cameron’s most human, most adult, and most deeply felt film.
For those who have not seen The Abyss (which I’m going to assume is, *scans crowd*, a lot of you), The Abyss stars Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as Bud and Nancy Brigman, feuding former spouses and the foreman and designer, respectively, of the Deep Core, an experimental underwater drilling platform. Bud runs it, Nancy created it, and the strain of their professional roles and their temperaments drove the couple apart.
They are forced back together when a U.S. nuclear submarine encounters…something, and goes dark near the Cayman Trench. Deep Core and its crew are commandeered by a military crew led by Colonel Coffey (Michael Biehn, returning for his third go-round with Cameron after Terminator and Aliens) to investigate the submarine.
Cold War tensions are high, and they are raised when a hurricane slams the area and cuts off Deep Core from the surface, leaving the Brigmans, their crew, and Coffey and his men stranded at the bottom of the ocean with a sub full of nukes, a collapsing rig, and a bottomless trench housing those strange, glowing…somethings.
Cameron, of course, is known for his spectacle, and while The Abyss is light on the sort of run-and-gun explosive mayhem that became his signature, almost every frame of the film is packed with jaw-dropping craft. There’s early CGI and some creature effects that have held up remarkably well in the intervening decade, but it’s the actual, practical feat of the film’s basic nature that is most astonishing.
There are shots throughout The Abyss that to this day I have no idea how they were accomplished without killing everyone involved (though the seemingly endless stories of the nightmare production suggest that almost every day brought a close call. To this day, Ed Harris refuses to discuss the making of The Abyss, and one story has it that he was so overwhelmed by the production that he burst into spontaneous tears while driving home one day, and had to pull the car over). You almost forget while you’re watching it how almost every. Single. Shot. is a miracle of craft and care. At a certain point the massive underwater vistas become almost commonplace, but then there’ll be some new expanse, some new sequence, that reminds you of just how spectacular this all is and shock you anew.
Honestly, the craft of The Abyss is so incredible that it probably could have gotten away with letting the side down on things like story and character. It’d still be worth watching just to say “Wow, how the shit did they do that?” Except, for maybe the only time in his career, Cameron’s heart is less with the tech, and more with the people.
The knock against James Cameron for a long time has been that while his films are impossibly complex feats of technology and special effects, his stories are threadbare and his characters broad types. Especially with back-to-back world-conquerors Titanic and Avatar, the people in the film can consider themselves well-rounded if they manage up to two dimensions, and many can’t even muster that. If you compare Avatar to, say, Aliens, or even Terminator, you can see Cameron working through the same basic set of archetypes and the same narrative/thematic concerns, with little evolution.
The Abyss is comfortably a James Cameron, so far as that goes. Like his other films, it has a fetishistic eye for the military, for technology, and for military technology, while also being fearful about the roles of the military and technology in our lives. His preoccupations with nuclear conflict, with nature, and with strong-willed women who never met a room full of alpha dudes they couldn’t browbeat into submission (here embodied by Mastrantonio, introduced to us as “the queen bitch of the universe”) are all in ready supply.
Also, feet. Dude always showing feet.
Cameron uses broad archetypes because they are an easy, effective way to get audiences to invest in stories with fantastical premises. When you have a huge, complex world to explore/explain, as in Avatar/Titanic/Terminator, it’s important to make sure that audiences can, you know, give a shit about what’s going on within that world. Cameron’s always been adept at knowing how to communicate the essence of character and conflict immediately and effectively, so that anyone watching, say, Terminator, can immediately identify who you’re rooting for, who you’re rooting against, and what the stakes of the conflict are, even if, say, the non-geek couldn’t tell you Skynet from shinola.
(This, by the way, is waaaaaaaaaay harder than it looks. There’s a reason that early versions of Star Wars were first unintelligible, then excruciating bores, until finally Marcia Lucas and the other editors carved the movie we now know as A New Hope out of it. There’s a reason the Wachowskis have resolutely been unable to recapture what made The Matrix such a phenomenon, and there’s a reason the aughts are littered with the mangled corpses of a thousand Harry Potter riffs that just couldn’t muster the same magic [natch]).
The Abyss sure seems like it’s going the same way, to the same effect. You have Blue Collar Man’s Man, Tough But Brilliant Ex-Wife, Crazy Military Guy, etc. And it works for the same reason that it works in other James Cameron films, because this approach, while it may be scoffed at by the hoi polloi as simple-minded, is wildly effective and gets at the very core as to why we watch/love movies and invest in them.
But The Abyss digs deeper than that, pushes further than that. It’s helped enormously by Harris and Mastrantonio, with each performer finding the human center of their characters. Harris has long embodied a very specific ideal of a particularly American form of masculinity, an ideal that’s been used for both heroic and villainous turns. The overwhelming impression is of a man with whom you do not fuck. But while Bud can out-alpha any other man in the world (“Out here, there’s me and then there’s God,” he says during one early, imposing scene), Harris taps into something gentler and warmer than he has in any of his other work, and it’s tremendously appealing.
For her part, Mastrantonio is more than able to capture the “queen bitch” mystique, and she rattles off what must have been pages and pages of technobabble exposition without hesitation. Lindsey’s not always the easiest person to like, but she also doesn’t much care if anyone likes her…which makes her all the more likable, somehow. But there’s a playful, excitable side to Lindsey as well, a joyous sense of discovery that she can’t repress even when lives (and the world) hang in the balance.
Cameron’s depictions of romance usually don’t go much farther than infatuation/consummation, with the lone other exception being the…regrettable…gender politics of True Lies. But The Abyss takes the time to dig into Bud and Lindsey, letting you see how two people so disparate could have come together, and taking the time to show those old sparks reignite. There’s no hero or villain when it comes to this couple, just two passionate individuals who know better than anyone else how to hurt each other, and how to raise each other up. This comes to a crescendo in a sequence that I won’t dare spoil, but suffice to say that it takes one of the most hack dramatic set-ups possible and pushes it to such raw extremes that it never fails to reduce me to tears every time I watch this film.
The Abyss, especially the extended edition, is filled with grace notes like that, as Cameron takes the time to give most every one of the Deep Core crew, and even the SEALs who are causing such problems, a grace moment or two, highlighting the messy humanity that they all share. Todd Graff, Kimberly Scott, Leo Burmester; they each sketch in a different corner of this strange little family, their awe and terror and joy and sorrow powering us through this adventure.
And the thing is, these characters and their bonds are not the colorful flavoring of the main dish. Rather, the film is about exactly that. Those strange, unpredictable bonds, those unknowable links that bridge souls that should have every reason to hate each other but choose love; these are not petty side concerns, but the things that have and will save the world.
Maybe that’s why I return to The Abyss again and again. Cinema has long been consumed by the notion of the apocalypse, James Cameron especially. But here, at the tail end of the Cold War and the beginning of a strange uncertain error whose madness we all now ride, Cameron suggests an alternative route. And while many a sci-fi film has posited the same sort of polemic, none of them have ever etched the idea with such stark clarity.
It’s the same gift that turned Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley into icons, the same gift that sent audiences in droves again and again to watch an old boat sink and blue cat people massacre humans. But the toy guns are gone, the computers are turned off, the fireworks are silent. In The Abyss, a man and a woman overcome an infinite unlikelihood to hold each other while the sun shines clear, and that’s a spectacle you can’t put a price tag on.